In March 2016 Toby Sanders was appointed the leader of the Leicester, Leicestershire and Rutland Sustainability and transformation plan footprint. The plans envisage closing all the acute beds at Leicester General Hospital. The University Hospitals of Leicester NHS Trust would have a net reduction of 243 acute beds. Maternity services in Leicester and Melton Mowbray will be consolidated onto one site at the Royal Infirmary. The in-patient facilities at Fielding Palmer Community Hospital in Lutterworth and Rutland Memorial Community Hospital in Oakham would close. Leicestershire is one of the areas piloting a new accountable care system which is proposed to involve two NHS trusts, three clinical commissioning groups, three local councils, the local ambulance service provider and social enterprise Derbyshire Health United. Leaders of Leicester City Council, Leicestershire County Council and Rutland County Council complained in September 2017 that plans were being concocted in secret with no public involvement or scrutiny and threatened to withdraw co-operation. Progress has been described as hesitant and secretive. A virtual 256-bed ‘hospital’ called Intensive Community Support has been established with staff of about 170 organised in five joint teams of district nurses, community mental health nurses, GPs and social workers focussed in keeping patients out of hospital. Each team has about 50 beds - in patients own homes. On average it supports a patient for about ten days. There are also plans to move 150,000 outpatient appointments out of hospitals into primary care settings. Setting this up was supposed to permit the closure of 65 acute beds, but in March 2018 they had not closed. the hospital trust says it is short of 105 beds. Staff at the University Hospitals of LeicesterNHS Trust will be cut by 1500, while primary care staff will be increased by 234. The three clinical commissioning groups decided to appoint a single accountable officer and management team in December 2018 with a view to a merger.
Commissioning
Leicestershire Health and Wellbeing Board places stress on the importance of housing and has put a housing specialist in Leicestershire Partnership Trust’s Bradgate Unit and three housing support officers at Leicester Royal Infirmary. Blaby District Council hosts a team of technical housing and grants officers, occupational therapists and adaptations specialists which is to be extended to the whole county. The number of over-85s in the county is forecast to grow by 187% by the late 2030s.
Primary care
s are provided in the county by and in the city by . There are 568 GPs in Leicestershire and Rutland.
The Sustainability and transformation plan envisages a cut of 40%, £29 million, to the NHS Continuing healthcare programme which supports more than 1300 patients in the county.
